“Almost Worthless”: Edward Upward’s Failures

Abstract Edward Upward’s revolutionary impulses were doomed to failure. A die-hard Marxist, he quit the British Communist Party in the mid-1940s because it was not adequately Leninist, and gave up the rich surrealism of his early work in favor of an extremely dry social realism, only to return to his fantastic style late in life. While Upward is often held up as a patron saint of lost potential, this essay argues that failure lies at the very heart of his aesthetic. Teetering between hope and unspeakable regret, Upward’s “art of failure” is remarkably ambivalent. Where his earlier novels employ failure as a tool of self-authorship, and even imagine it as a harbinger of revolutionary action, Upward’s final autobiographical writings (including some written in a hieroglyphic code) reflect on the everyday degradations involved in living past one’s peak.